


In Arkham

by dorothy_notgale



Category: Beyond Re-Animator (2003), Castle Freak, From Beyond (1986), Herbert West - Reanimator - H. P. Lovecraft, Re-Animator (1985), The Evil Clergyman, The Phantom Empire (1989)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-14
Updated: 2015-09-14
Packaged: 2018-04-20 18:47:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4798430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dorothy_notgale/pseuds/dorothy_notgale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan Cain has tried to put Herbert West behind him. It might be easier to do if he could stop seeing the man's face everywhere he goes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Arkham

Arkham, the heart and soul of the Miskatonic Valley, is an old town full of of old families with old ways. These ways are not, perhaps, as pronounced as up the road in the hamlets of Innsmouth or Dunwich, but nonetheless, the place's Puritan aversion to the embrace of genetic diversity sometimes makes Dan Cain feel as though he's surrounded by doubles.

Put more simply, notorious murderer Herbert West had a common sort of face.

It wasn't unheard of—Hell, Meg had been a rare beauty, but he still saw women on the street who could be her cousins (and likely were, by some greater or lesser number of removes). But these men he meets are too often at his hospital or on his slab, reduced purely to the unsettling familiarity of their component parts:

A young Anglican priest, eyes flecked with petechial hemorrhage and neck cleanly snapped by a noose in a frenzy of forbidden love.

A physicist, alternately mad and gentle, terrified of his own hideous murders, in and out of the mental ward and then burned to death within a week.

A professor, a family man, shipped home from Italy following an unfortunate plummet from a parapet.

A geologist, smothered in a cave-in while his gas-addled companions raved about spacewomen.

Small bodies with once-mobile features and flaming, passionate minds. Falling, always falling from a great height, or crushed beneath unimaginable weight.

He thinks maybe they've had it wrong all these years. It's not the dead who haunt you, but the living—for it was only Herbert West's dream that Dan killed. And at this point, the body's survival feels like an oversight.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Not even gonna lie; this was directly inspired by Suzanne Vega's [In Liverpool](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0df0racc3vk)


End file.
